AMAZING STORY

Charles Brown Comes Clean

By Michelle WilsonThe 700 Club

CBN.com
 Charles Brown says evil spirits began tormenting him after he started using crack cocaine.

“It was a lot of times I couldn’t sleep and I felt like I was mentally crazy.”

Charles grew up in South Carolina and began smoking pot as a teenager. He’d always been a little afraid of harder drugs, then, when he was 28, some people invited him to smoke crack for the first time.

Charles remembers, “I ended up taking a hit of it and it scared me cause my heart was beating way faster and I wasn’t used to that. I thought I was going to die.”

10 minutes later, Charles took a second hit from the crack pipe. From that moment on he was hooked.

“It was calling me. It was a drug that would call you even if you didn’t want it.”

Now the only thing that mattered to Charles was his next hit. He spent everything he earned to buy more crack. Eventually, his drug addiction cost him his construction job and his wife and children. He even began losing his mind.

Charles recalls, “I’d walk backwards, I’d walk forward. I’d touch things two and three times, you know, all this crazy stuff was happening and I couldn’t stop doing it. I started cracking up, losing it mentally, spiritually and physically.”

But Charles says living with regret became his greatest torment.

“The devil had me feeling like, ‘Yeah, you’ve got all this time, now you can do what you want, Charlie.’ But after that time passed by I’d start crying. And I’d feel guilty, you know, cause everything I had good was destroyed,” says Charles.

Charles stole money from his friends and family to support his growing drug habit. Eventually, he was homeless and began sleeping in abandoned houses. That is when he could sleep.

Charles remembers, “And you would hear the walls like if somebody was shaking them, or you could hear something rub inside them like a hand sliding up and down the wall. And then you would hear footsteps. There was times when I’d get up one and two o’clock in the morning and I’d go to the hospital and I’d sit in the waiting room just so I could sleep.”

Charles even tried praying to escape the torment.

“I would ask the Lord to remove it out of my life and I would swear that I’d never touch it again. And just as soon as I’d get off my knees praying somebody would knock at my door or blow a horn, Satan and I’d let him right back in there.”

When his prayers didn’t seem to work, he tried witchcraft.

I’d put red crushed pepper in there just to keep enemies away. And I would put x’s on all my windows, you know? I couldn’t sleep and I would holler out cuss words to God and tell him to make it leave,” says Charles.

Charles knew he was losing touch with reality, so he finally went to a doctor.

Charles remembers, “When they told me I was bipolar and schizophrenic, during that time and being on drugs and alcohol the way I really thought the doctor was crazy. I didn’t think that I was really that way to a certain extent.”

Charles took his medicine but he kept using crack. Then he heard about a residential treatment home that helps addicts break free from their addictions. While there, Charles started watching the 700 Club and calling CBN for prayer.

“She said, ‘Pray this prayer.’ And ‘Lord, I confess with my heart all my sins, and I’m asking your forgiveness.’ And once I said that, and confessed it out of my mouth, and the Lord know me better than I know myself, I began to feel the weight of the whole world come off my shoulder. It was just like boom. Like God just reach down and said, ‘Leave him.’ And I mean, it’s just powerful.”

After that prayer, Charles said he felt like God had completely delivered him from his drug addiction and healed him of his mental illnesses.

Charles recalls, “I’d be talking to God. And I’d walk and I’d go in there and grab the bible, and I’d go in every room where I used to put crushed red pepper. I didn’t have to do that no more. I’d just go in there and I’d (phewwww!) You know, and God would make me smile more and more and it got better and better and better and better.”

Charles spent three years at the Oxford house. Once he left he started going to church and found a new way of living.

“I finally started getting on that straight and narrow and I started smiling. And I would go in the bathroom and look in the mirror and I’d pat myself and I’d say, ‘Charlie, you’re going to be all right.’ And I know that was God coming through.”

Today, Charles is living a drug free life and he no longer has to take psychiatric medicine. He says, God completely healed him. He now has a job and an apartment and is enjoying his new life in Christ.

“I used to be a dressed up trash can, now I dress up for Jesus. And God took that dead flower and he made it bloom all over again. And through all the things and many times I turned my back and walked away and left him, he never left me. He’s always there for me. And he turned my frown into a smile.”